own iniquity and malice, and when the treaty of Cambray was completed, he had announced it to her with the words: “My peace with the Emperor is made: it will last as long as you choose.”84
Chapuys had been charged to ascertain the feeling of the English people. He found them generally well affected to the Queen. But the Lutheran heresy was creeping in. The Duke of Suffolk had spoken bitterly of Papal legates, and Chapuys believed if they had nothing to fear but the Pope’s malediction, there were great numbers who would follow the Duke’s advice and make Popes of the King and Bishops, all to have the divorce case tried in England.85 The Queen was afraid of pressing her appeal, fearing that if the Commons in Parliament heard that the King had been summoned to Rome, measures injurious to her might easily be proposed and carried.86 Even the Duke of Norfolk was not satisfactory. He professed to be devoted to the Emperor; he said he would willingly have lost a hand so that the divorce question should never have been raised; but it was an affair of theology and canon law, and he had not meddled with it. If the Emperor had remained neutral, instead of interfering, it would have been sooner settled.87
But, for the instant, the interests of the people of England were fixed on a subject more immediately close to them. The sins of the clergy had at last found them out. They pretended to be a supernatural order, to hold the keys of heaven and hell, to be persons too sacred for ordinary authority to touch. Their vices and their tyranny had made them and their fantastic assumptions no longer bearable, and all Europe was in revolt against the scandals of the Church and Churchmen. The ecclesiastical courts, as the pretended guardians of morality, had the laity at their mercy; and every offence, real or imaginary, was converted into an occasion of extortion. The courts were themselves nests of corruption; while the lives and habits of the order which they represented made ridiculous their affectations of superiority to common men. Clement’s conduct of the divorce case was only a supreme instance of the methods in which the clerical tribunals administered what they called justice. An authority equally oblivious of the common principles of right and wrong was extended over the private lives and language of every family in Catholic Christendom. In England the cup was full and the day of reckoning had arrived. I have related in the first volume of my history of the period the meeting of the Parliament of 1529, and I have printed there the Petition of the Commons to the Crown, with the Bishops’ reply to it.88 I need not repeat what has been written already. A few more words are needed, however, to explain the animosity which broke out against Wolsey. The great Cardinal was the living embodiment of the detested ecclesiastical domination, and a representation in his own person of the worst abuses complained of. He had been a vigorous Minister, full of large schemes and high ambitions. He had been conscious of much that was wrong. He had checked the eagerness of the bench of Bishops to interfere with opinion, had suppressed many of the most disorderly smaller monasteries, and had founded colleges out of their revenues. But he had left his own life unreformed, as an example of avarice and pride. As Legate he had absorbed the control of the entire ecclesiastical organisation. He had trampled on the Peers. On himself he had piled benefice upon benefice. He held three great bishoprics, and, in addition to them, the wealthiest of the abbeys. York or Durham he had never entered; Winchester he may have visited in intervals of business; and he resided occasionally at the Manor of the More, which belonged to St. Albans: but this was all his personal connection with offices to which duties were attached which he would have admitted to be sacred, if, perhaps, with a smile. As Legate and Lord Chancellor he disposed of the whole patronage of the realm. Every priest or abbot who needed a license had to pay Wolsey for it. His officials were busy in every diocese. Every will that was to be proved, every marriage within the forbidden degrees, had to pass under their eyes, and from their courts streams richer than Pactolus flowed into Wolsey’s coffers. Foreign princes, as we have seen, were eager to pile pensions upon him. His wealth was known to be enormous. How enormous was now to be revealed. Even his own son – for a son he had – was charged upon the commonwealth. The worst iniquity of the times was the appointing children to the cure of souls. Wolsey’s boy was educated at Paris, and held benefices worth 1,500 crowns a year, or 3,000 pounds of modern English money. A political mistake had now destroyed his credit. His enemies were encouraged to speak, and the storm burst upon him.
A list of detailed complaints against him survives which is curious alike from its contents, the time at which it was drawn up, and the person by whom it was composed – the old Lord Darcy of Templehurst, the leader afterwards in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Darcy was an earnest Catholic. He had fought in his youth under Ferdinand at the conquest of Granada. He was a dear friend of Ferdinand’s daughter, and an earnest supporter, against Wolsey, of the Imperial alliance. His paper is long and the charges are thrown together without order. The date is the 1st of July, when the Legates’ court had begun its sittings and was to end, as he might well suppose, in Catherine’s ruin. They express the bitterness of Darcy’s feelings. The briefest epitome is all that can be attempted of an indictment which extended over the whole of Wolsey’s public career. It commences thus: —
“Hereafter followeth, by protestation, articles against the Cardinal of York, shewed by me, Thomas Darcy, only to discharge my oath and bounden duty to God and the King, and of no malice.
“1. All articles that touches God and his Church and his acts against the same.
“2. All that touches the King’s estate, honour and prerogative, and against his laws.
“3. Lack of justice, and using himself by his authority as Chancellor faculties legatine and cardinal; what wrongs, exactions he hath used.
“4. All his authorities, legatine and other, purchased of the Pope, and offices and grants that he hath of the King’s grace, special commissions and instructions sent into every shire; he, and the Cardinal’s servants, to be straitly examined of his unlawful acts.”
Following vaguely this distribution, Darcy proceeds with his catalogue of wrongs. Half the list is of reforms commenced and unfinished, everything disturbed and nothing set right, to “the ruffling of the good order of the realm.” Of direct offences we find Wolsey unexpectedly accused of having broken the Præmunire statute by introducing faculties from Rome and allowing the Pope to levy money in the realm contrary to the King’s prerogative royal, while for himself, by “colour of his powers as Cardinal legate a latere and faculties spiritual and temporal, he had assembled marvellous and mighty sums of money.” Of bishops, abbots, priors, deans, &c., he had received (other sums) for promotion spiritual since his entry. He had appropriated the plate and jewels of the suppressed abbeys. He had raised the “probate duty” all over the realm, the duty going into his own coffers. He had laid importable charges on the nobles of the realm. He had Towered, Fleeted, and put to the walls of Calais a number of the noblemen of England, and many of them for light causes. He had promoted none but such as served about the King to bring to pass his purposes, or were of his council in such things as an honest man would not vouchsafe to be acquainted with. He had hanged, pressed, and banished more men since he was in authority than had suffered death by way of justice in all Christendom besides. He had wasted the King’s treasure, &c. He had levied mighty sums of other houses of religion, some for dread to be pulled down, and others by his feigned visitations under colour of virtuous reformation. As Chancellor “he had taken up all the great matters depending in suit to determine after his discretion, and would suffer no way to take effect that had been devised by other men.” In other times “the best prelate in the realm was contented with one bishoprick.” Darcy demanded that the duties of bishops should be looked into. They should hold no temporal offices, nor meddle with temporal affairs. They should seek no dispensation from the Pope. The tenure of land in England should be looked into, to find what temporal lands were in spiritual men’s hands, by what titles, for what purposes, and whether it was followed or no. The King’s grace should proceed to determine all reformations, of spiritual and temporal, within his realm. Never more Legate nor Cardinal should be in England: these legacies and faculties should be clearly annulled
Chapuys to Charles V., Sept. 2, 1529. —
Chapuys to Charles V., Sept. 2, 1529. —
The transcripts of these documents were furnished to me by the late Sir Francis Palgrave, who was then Keeper of the Records.
